Electronic messaging services have become critical to the efficient operation of business. These services have also become an indispensable tool for many individuals. As the importance of electronic messaging services has grown, so has the importance of providing these services in a reliable, robust and cost-effective manner. The markets in which the service providers provide these services have also become highly competitive, and this competitive environment exerts additional pressure on the service providers to continually improve electronic messaging services. Service providers see erosion in their existing subscriber base as competitive service providers continue to make it easier and attractive to migrate to their service offerings. An inability to change service offerings to keep pace with functional requirements causes additional erosion. In order to compete effectively and increase subscriber base, a service provider must endeavor to provide the highest possible level of sought-after services while simultaneously delivering those services at a reasonable price.
Electronic messaging service providers currently provide a plurality of specialized value-added services to both business and individual users. Although the earliest true electronic messaging can be traced back to 1844 and the advent of the first practical electric telegraph system; electronic messaging now principally includes messaging via e-mail, facsimile, interactive paging and voice communications systems, both wired and wireless. However, electronic messaging is by no means limited to these mediums. For example, various video mail solutions are becoming widely available. For example, Pacific Image Communications offers a home or small-office/home-office (SOHO) product, Super Voice® Videomail, that allows the attachment of a video and audio message to a standard e-mail message. (Super Voice® is a registered trademark of Pacific Image Communications, Inc.)
Also, videophones and video conferencing are now ubiquitous in large businesses. High-speed data lines, which were until recently limited to high-cost dedicated lines, have migrated to the home in the form of digital subscriber lines (xDSL) and cable-modems. This increase in available bandwidth enables a higher level of electronic messaging service content in the home, and in combination with readily available video communications equipment will expand the demand for video-based messaging services in the home as well.
Electronic messaging services beyond the basic sending, receiving and storing of messages differ somewhat depending on the medium in which the message is being transmitted. These services include, but are most certainly not limited to, message forwarding, automatic message replies and message blocking. Despite a proliferation of available messaging services, one basic service lacking from communications is a robust and flexible means to determine the status of an electronic message once it has been received by a recipient's messaging system. Although both e-mail systems and voicemail systems do provide for limited status notification, as will be discussed below, several key requisites for a truly robust and flexible service are lacking from both sets of offerings.
Most widely available e-mail systems adhere to Internet standards as set forth in the Requests for Comment (RFC). Generally, those systems that do not specifically adhere to the Internet standards, such as those systems which adhere to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU-T) X.400 standards, provide interfaces, which in turn provide Internet standards compatibility. Adherence to the Internet standards includes providing a means of status notification to the sender in the form of a message disposition notification (MDN). As those skilled in the art are sure to recognize, disposition in this sense is not limited to a final action taken on a message but rather includes any action directed to the message after successful delivery. Although e-mail systems adhering to the standards do provide MDN, the provision is subject to a variety of limitations. RFC 2398, the draft standard for MDN, defines a Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) content-type that a messaging system uses to report the disposition of a message after successful delivery. The standard defines disposition event types, which include, but are not limited to, displayed, dispatched, deleted, denied and mailbox-terminated events. Dispatch of a message means to send the message to a destination; dispatch includes forwarding, replying and any other act, which would result in sending the message to a destination. When any of the disposition events occurs, an e-mail system adhering to the standard sends a disposition notification message to a mailbox specified by the original sender in the header of the original message.
Voicemail services and systems function within telecommunications networks, and modern telecommunications networks adhere to a common set of industry-specific standards. However, the actual feature sets included in voicemail and other value-added services are not the subject of these standards. Instead, the service providers and their suppliers are responsible for determining the feature set that they include in a particular service. The provision of status notification in voicemail services is even more limited than in e-mail systems. One exemplary voicemail service is the BellSouth® MemoryCall® service. MemoryCall® provides status notification in the form of a confirmation that a message has been accessed. When the recipient of the voicemail message accesses the message, a confirmation message is created and stored in the voicemail box of the originating caller. The originating caller must be an existing subscriber to the MemoryCall® service, i.e., the voicemail box must be preexisting. (BellSouth® is a registered trademark of BellSouth Intellectual Property Corporation. MemoryCall® is a registered service mark of BellSouth Corporation.)
E-mail and voicemail systems are subject to a number of limitations in the provision of status messages. First, in an e-mail messaging system adhering to RFC 2398, the recipient of the status notification must be identified as an attribute in the header of the original message (Disposition-Notification-To). The attribute must specify a valid mailbox to which a status notification may be sent. In other words, the originator of the message must specify a pre-existing address to which the status notification is subsequently sent. The requirement to specify a preexisting address poses a number of problems regarding disposition notification. First, if a sender is absent from the office due to travel or other reason, the sender may be unable to gain access to the mailbox when the disposition notification is sent. A second problem arises from the transitory nature of e-mail subscribers. The sender of a message may switch e-mail service providers between the time the disposition notification was requested and the time the notification is actually sent. The subsequent notification message may be sent to a non-existing address, or even more troubling, to a mailbox belonging to someone who was not a party to the original message. An analogous problem is present in current voicemail services. As stated above, to utilize voicemail confirmation in the MemoryCall® service, the caller must be an existing subscriber of the service, i.e., the caller must have a predefined relationship with the voicemail system. Since the telecommunication service provider generally provides this type of service, this requirement limits the availability of this feature to those callers living or working within in a specific region, or perhaps, even within a specific community.
Another limitation inherent in both e-mail and voicemail services is that the creation and distribution of the status notification is based solely on the actions taken by the recipient, by the recipient's messaging system or by the administrator of the recipient's messaging system. The sender or caller cannot initiate the creation of the status notification. Often, the need for a status notification is deadline-riven; the sender or caller is interested in knowing if the message is accessed prior to a certain date. If the sender or caller receives no notification and has no means of confirming whether or not the message has been accessed by that date, then the status notification service is of no benefit to the sender or caller.
One possible solution to the reliance upon actions by the recipient has been posed in the patent to David S. Mohler, U.S. Pat. No. 6,175,859. Mohler provides for the establishment of a reply time at which the sender's or the recipient's messaging system determines whether or not the recipient has accessed the message. The subject system then creates a message denoting whether or not the message was accessed and sends the message back to the sender of the original message. However, Mohler does not provide a robust and flexible means of determining the message status. Mohler requires that the sender specify a reply time during message creation. It is not possible for the sender to check the status either multiple or varied times. Mohler also limits the destination of the reply to the origination point of the message. Mohler clearly does not address the most critical limitations of status notification as provided by current electronic messaging systems.
Another limitation of current electronic messaging systems is that only attributes of the message such as the recipient, the date created and perhaps a portion of the message to serve to identify a message in a status notification. It may be quite difficult for a sender or caller to associate the status certification with the correct message. For instance, if a sender or caller using one of these services sends a particular recipient multiple messages on the same day, it may be very difficult for the sender to determine to which message the status notification applies.
Some of the limitations on status notification apply primarily to a specific medium. For example, a limitation of current e-mail systems is that a MDN message must be sent for each disposition of the message. Depending on the requirements of the sender, many of the MDN messages provided will be at least valueless and at worst distracting and irritating. Another limitation of current e-mail MDN solutions is that the MDN message may be sent to an address in a foreign system, raising security concerns for both the sender and the recipient. For example, if a sender were to change e-mail addresses between the sending of a message requiring status notification and the actual notification, then it is possible that a third party with no association to the communication receives the status notification. It is likely that one or both of the actual parties to the communication considers the disposition notification information to be confidential and would therefore desire that no third party have access to the information.
A limitation peculiar to voicemail systems is the inability to monitor a range of event types when the recipient accesses the message. A caller may wish to know whether or not the recipient deleted a message without actually listening to it, forwarded the message to another party, or if the recipient was deleted from the voicemail system without ever having accessed the message. This information is unavailable in current voicemail services.